Name: The ultimate beginner's guide to the Metaverse: What it is, how to jump in, and how to buy real estate
Uploaded: 2022-03-17
Duration: 16 min 36 s
Description: Take a tour of the virtual worlds that make up the metaverse in Fortune's new video series 'N3w Lands'.

Take a tour of the virtual worlds that make up the metaverse in Fortune's new video series 'N3w Lands'.

The ultimate beginner's guide to the Metaverse: What it is, how to jump in, and how to buy real estate

Fortune_Crypto

The ultimate beginner's guide to the Metaverse

Watch: The ultimate beginner's guide to the Metaverse

what is the metaverse? Where are we at with it today? Sure. The metaverse is, it's a widely used term right now and I think what makes it so difficult to grasp is that there are just many working definitions of what it is and I think that's because we don't fully understand what is evolving at the moment. That term has kind of been coincided with what the next phase of the internet is likely to be moving towards the kind of series of virtual worlds that all fit under this umbrella term of the metaverse. But I think everyone will give you a slightly different definition of what that is based off of what they do and how they interact with the web. The metaverse is a place to see experience and reflect on your highest values is an amalgamation of digital overlays to the reality that we experience, you know, something as simple as a Snapchat filter is a metaverse, the chance to reshape all the wrongs of society that have played out in the real world by having the community first turns traditional dynamics on their head and all encompassing digital landscape where people can cooperate and work together and play together in this kind of virtual space. The metaverse is what happens when the internet goes from being judy to being three D and immersive, interactive and social. It is like spatial web, it's a chance for you to like see and connect with human beings in a more authentic way potentially, which is why I think the metaverse is a place to achieve like value alignment with your fellow humans. Mm hmm. The experiences in the metaverse vary. You can go to the casino and play poker. You can watch a virtual concert in the metaverse. Or you can build fascinating digital structures that bend the laws of physics. You can go to virtual art galleries. I love the idea of walking through digital art because it's it really makes you realize that what you're seeing is real and totally unreal at the same time, um which is great. Everyone needs a mind, fuck all sorts of things that you might be able to do in the real world. You can also do in these virtual worlds. There's the kind of centralized web two Metaverse. Some web two applications are second life in view roadblocks. Minecraft Fortnite. These are all games that have existed before and they're very centralized. They're controlled by one single company for example. Minecraft is controlled by Microsoft and everything that you buy in the game for instance, is owned by that one company. And so that's where the centralization comes from. Books. The branding to meta is their shift to the university and embodied internet where you're in the experience, not just looking at it and we call this the metaverse meta launched its metaverse platform, Horizon World, last december and Horizon World is basically a social space where you can go and and talk to your friends sort of like a VR based version of facebook. It is centralized in that meta is designing and developing it and ultimately will govern it and govern the future of it. And then there's the web. Three metaphors which is powered by decentralized technologies powered by cryptocurrencies. It has a kind of more distributed maybe more democratized kind of ownership model of what's being created there. N. F. T. Stands for non fungible token. And it's a way for people to attract the ownership of a unique item on the Blockchain. The Blockchain refers to a transparent digital ledger on the internet on which all the transactions made in Cryptocurrency or where N. F. T. S are bought and sold are recorded. The most popular Blockchain is the ethereum Blockchain by far it has the most developers and it's actually the Blockchain on which the Central land and the sandbox, the two most popular metaverse platforms are built. And so in some of these metaverse platforms and metaverse games, the in game items, creatures or avatars that are within these games actually exist on the Blockchain as an FFT. And so that means that they can be traced back to their original owner and they can be bought and sold on third party exchanges. I am right now wearing an N. F. T token. I'm inside an N. F. T world created on our platform, uploaded through our sDK and this world if the user who created this world wanted to sell it, he can he can tell the whole world to some other person in a decentralized way. There's really the big four right now, that's crypto space to central land and each of them have their own aesthetics, they have their own style. The kind of first layer is a giant public space virtual and there are different ways that you can kind of build structures within that. But then there are other layers and other tools that exist in these worlds to kind of create games on top of them or create kind of sub experiences that allow you to go a little bit deeper. Sandboxes has done really well with getting a lot of brand partnerships and early adopters in there, buying up land and kind of planting their flag. Our objective is to re create most of the activities, the experience from the real world, such as going to see concert, attending art galleries, music festivals, museums, finding, create social moment and connection or playing games leveraging on web free and this new technology Blockchain, we want players and creators to truly own this whole world. So 100% of the map will be in the end of users and progressively we will be decentralizing the governance of this world so that users can actively participate into voting decision and the direction the world with evolved, there's something in space, it's a virtual reality forward. So everything there is pretty focused on how you experience it with the VR headset on. It was the first world to do that. And I think it's really a pioneer in that respect. The aesthetics are very realistic. You see everything around around us right now, those are user generated build, we call this world based reality world where everybody starts and everybody built, we have also N. F. T World. So users are able to purchase an NFC world and they can put portals on their land parcels for other users to dive in so we can go in this one. So now we're downloading it, That is absolutely magical, wow. Do you see what I see? So somebody built this in VR and then uploaded using our sdK into some new um and scripted everything here to make it, you know, move and make sounds and make everything else. It's amazing. It's probably probably really nice on your screen right now, how it looks. But trust me, when I see it in VR in full scale, it's just medical. I prefer to work in crypto box sells because it's very user friendly. It's very simple. It's also VR and mobile friendly. I tend to gravitate towards the simpler forms. I think there's something about Vauxhall based metaverse, is that appeal to people that have already experienced Minecraft and kind of understand those building mechanics and what things can look like within those constraints. You can see that my character is made out of the box of images and that's part of the appeal of this is that you can kind of create your own avatars and you can decide whether it has a head or a body or you can just make it a floating cloud with a camera. Like I did were actually relating to box will stop calm because many of the emails someone to say I can't wait to crypto boxes. Half the developers are like crypto is a scam and a fraud and refused to answer your emails. The thing with crypto box filled is we wanted to make it super accessible. I really don't believe in one big metaverse that everyone has to live in or that everyone exists. And I believe in lots of small metaverse is that kind of inter operate together that you can instantly enter instantly except take your friends and your group of people when you're in the world exploring, it's just in your browser if you copy the your L. A. Where you are and then you paste it to a friend, they click that link and they instantly school next year there's no log in and the requirement for ethereum, you just instantly in the world, the platform works. It's very simple, you can just put down blocks. It's very much like Minecraft. So here you can go to lighting, you can bake a light map which then in a second you'll see it gives you more of a three dimensional lighting on the room there it goes. Now you got purple light in the room thinking that it loads really fast and it works on on on potato computers we call them. It's it's really important to me like it shouldn't be elitist and so that's why we've kind of really targeted hardware that everyone's got and and web browsers and everyone's got many of these decentralized metaverse platforms like the sandbox or the central and have their own cryptocurrencies. Sunday is the utility token that's really supporting rural platform for payment for access for taking for governance. Well over 40 or 50 exchange globally where you can acquire sand or there's ways like ramp up solution with a credit card to acquire sand into your wallet but you still need the wallet wallet is really the way to access decentralization into web freeze. The most common is meta mask but basically it's both a wallet for holding your currency and your N. F. T. S. But more importantly it's your identity, it's your login, it's your personal signature. The meta mask browser extension turns google chrome into an ethereum browser letting websites retrieve data from the Blockchain and letting users securely manage identities and sign transactions. Anyone can come and experience the metaverse and walk around the art galleries or go to a virtual concert or go to the museum at no cost or you can enter and acquire land and build structures and build virtual experiences on top of that land there are many different worlds. They're all priced differently. A piece of land in the metaverse costs about 10 to $12,000. Generally in the larger metaverse is you can you can certainly find metaverse land for less. But in general the platforms that the vast majority of people tend to focus on, The prices have started to converge right around that $10,000 Mark, primarily speaking all land is, each parcel of land is kind of, the N. F. T. Is basically like a title or a deed to that land and that plot and that coordinate if you hold that in your wallet and your ethereum wallet, the game recognizes that you hold it and then gives you permission to do things on that plot of land. That means you can add objects to it, you can add other N. F. T. S to it. If you have artwork in your wallet and those are N. F. T. S. You can install that in front of land. So parcel is the destination for virtual real estate. We are an agnostic, you know, neutral aggregator of virtual land listings, data and information parcel was created out of basically a need for better user experience for virtual land users. So the listings were fragmented across different marketplaces, prices were opaque. There was no sense of how much parcel of land should be worth and just generally the buried entry was and still largely is very high. Today we are the first N. F. T. Marketplace focused exclusively on virtual land. We have interactive maps, real time price appraisals. We have been called Zillow for the metaverse in the past and that's analogy I think helps a lot of people wrap their head around what we're doing. Individuals like Andrew Keagle from tokens dot com have invested millions into different plots of land on platforms with the hopes of it appreciating or of building experience on it. If you want to sort of envision what it is that we're doing by buying this virtual land, we're going to aim to be a virtual landlord in the metaverse and we're in a sense pre purchasing advertising space, you know Mark Zuckerberg has predicted there'd be billions of people using the metaverse in the next few years but you think about the value of that land as there's more visitor traffic walking around. It's priceless companies such as every realm are building out investment portfolios of metaverse land that they're either developing or hoping that the prices will appreciate in order to sell if land is finite and held in the hands of a very few people that do not develop content or partner with content creators, the metaverse won't take off. Therefore I believe there is a strong mutual desire on both the part of the land owner and the content creators to work together to collaborate to make things that make the metaverse more interesting more compelling to users if everybody who buys metaverse real estate does nothing with it. The value of all the metaverse real estate in that platform will likely go to zero because they will never attract users. Therefore through free market economies where people generally tend to make logical decisions. I would tend to bet on an outcome where there might be landlords, there might be content creators, they may not be the exact same person always, but they're going to work together because it's mutually beneficial for them to collaborate. The whales have already bought massive stocks of of metaverse land and a good group of them is interested in making that a democratic exercise and building on the land meaningfully with other people's collaboration and an even bigger group is just flipping it and making like 60 70% profits on their initial investment, like beef frank. Yeah, like I believe that digital land is a non scarce and non valuable asset in the metaverse and I believe that digital land will be as ubiquitous as a web page is today. I think if you are buying virtual land in these worlds, you are buying a specific developer set of tools to kind of like participate and play on that land, although I do not think that it's like necessary or a prerequisite to be involved in these worlds in any way, shape or form. And I think that like leaders of the future will be those that provide that space for people to express themselves in this idea of a spatial web For free, you know, media tend to just jump on the numbers, but people don't understand why it is worth that money. In many cases it doesn't worth anything because people cannot even build on some platforms which are selling those numbers. So this is pure speculation. But for example, if we say, Okay, some parcel or some new world has sold for $50,000. Okay, now you understand why? Because the creator of this environment can upload this environment inside that world and he can monetize this as an NFC token. He can either sell it or he can charge people to come here and he can have concerts here. Amazing technology and amazing experiences are coming together with an ability for creators to actually finally monetize their work and share it with the world and be able to self sustainably build things and create things and continuing this as a full time job. Yeah, mm hmm. Yeah. Yeah. Mhm. Yeah.